K. Marvin Bruce

I was recently reading a piece by a New York Times best-selling author.  It was a bit discouraging.  Best-sellers, he noted, are often decided on the basis of hundreds, not thousands, of sales.  The book-buying public is small. Reading, this author averred, is hard work.  Most people would rather watch TV or surf the net.  Anything but read. My friend Steve works in the publishing industry.  He told me once that studies show only about 5% of the US population buys books.  While that’s a low percent, it is a high enough number to keep the industry going.  Still, it does make it harder for writers. A publishing industry feeling stressed will try more and more for “a sure thing” rather than to take a chance on something new.  The runaway success of Andy Weir’s  The Martian and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train —both passed by major houses as too outré until they started making money—show that editors often have no id...

Books are a funny business.  You may have noticed that Amazon sells books for less than the cover price.  What might not be obvious is that the price of the book printed on it is a suggested retail price. A friend works in publishing.  He tells me it is unlike any other business.  For example, when publishers sell books to a wholesaler, unlike almost no other industry, they must be willing to accept returns.  If Barnes and Noble buys five hundred copies and only sells fifty, the publisher has to take the stock back and mark those sales as losses. For reasons such as this, and declining print sales, publishers have to be careful about the print run.  Too much stock costs money to warehouse, and if it doesn’t sell, it gets marked down.  These deeper discounts lead to remaindering, which is why you can find bargain books at B&N. Pricing a book is a bit of a guess.  Part of it has to do with how expensive a book is to make.  The ...